I know I'm rather late to the party, but I've been doing a lot of
reading lately about web components and related technologies, and the
one thing that confounds me is the fact that web components appear not
to have any "real" namespacing.
Can someone explain why this is so, and what the justification is? Or is
it just a case of "it was too complicated, this is good enough"?
I see this has been brought up once before @
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013AprJun/0964.html,
but nothing changed.
It's not going to be long before <x-tabs> has been defined by 1,000,000
people (slight exaggeration), and you have no idea what it is or where
it came from without looking through imports/scripts etc. Also you want
to keep things short, so you call your element <ms-panel> (you work for
Monkey Solutions LLC), but then someone else on the team is importing
<ms-panel> from Microsoft, and BAM!, you have another problem.
Why can't we do something like this?
<!-- /scripts/monkey-solutions/panel.js -->
<script>
var panel = document.registerElement("panel", {
namespace: "ms https://monkey-solutions.com/namespace";
});
</script>
<!-- /scripts/microsoft/panel.js -->
<script>
var panel = document.registerElement("panel", {
namespace: "ms https://microsoft.com/namespace";
});
</script>
<!-- Uses last defined element, as it currently works. -->
<ms-panel>
<!-- Redefine the namespace prefix for one of the custom elements. -->
<element name="panel" namespace="https://microsoft.com/namespace";
prefix="msft" />
<ms-panel>
<msft-panel>
You could also assign a prefix to all elements within a namespace like this:
<element name="*" namespace="https://microsoft.com/namespace";
prefix="msft" />
You can override the prefix multiple times and the closest <element>
definition is used.
Please note that the above syntax is just an example of what could be used.
Another BIG pro here is that IDEs can pull in information about the
elements by sending an HTTP request to the namespace URI so that a
tooltip could be displayed with an element description, author, sample
usage, etc.
I really do hope that it's not too late to make such a change.
Regards,
Glen.
